Productivity applications are utilized for a wide variety of tasks, including creating and working with reports in documents such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Examples of productivity applications include, but are not limited to, word processors, spreadsheet software, presentation applications, note taking applications, and collaboration software.
An increasing number of productivity applications are delivered as software services from what is colloquially referred to as the cloud. In these deployments, a local application may run on a user's device that provides a user interface to an application service hosted in a data center or some other computing environment. The documents that a user works with may be stored locally but may also be stored by the service or by an associated cloud-based storage service. Any number of computing devices may be leveraged to take advantage of such services, including, but not limited to, mobile devices, smart phones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers, and any other suitable platform.
Several significant barriers confront users when developing reports in productivity applications. Some productivity applications provide data connections that allow a document to connect to an external data source. Queries may also be defined that allow data sources to be queried from within a document. However, defining a given data connection or query can be a time consuming and painstaking task, especially for users that are not familiar with such tools.
The difficulty associated with creating data connections, queries, and other artifacts may discourage users from utilizing them. In the event a user does proceed with creating a document artifact, he or she may be duplicating the efforts of others. Users may mitigate some of the challenges encountered when creating data connections and queries by manually searching through other spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents that might contain useful connections and queries that a user could use as a template. Search tools exist for searching document repositories for relevant documents, but utilizing these tools falls outside of a user's normal work flow.